Roughly halfway through “Bulletproof Monk,” a scene depicts a crowd of angry moviegoers lobbing soda and popcorn at a screen.
Audiences, take your cue!
Watching cola and kernels of corn slowly trickle down a blank screen would be far more entertaining and worthwhile than actually viewing “Bulletproof Monk.”
Monk With No Name (yes, that is actually the protagonist’s name, or lack thereof, played half-heartedly by Chow Yun-Fat of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) is the guardian of a sacred scroll. If read aloud in its entirety, the scroll gives its orator the power to control the world.
But the world is not ready for any one person to have such magnificent power, so a chosen individual closely guards the scroll for a period of 60 years, and then the responsibility is passed on.
Monk With No Name finds his reign over the scroll expiring and is in search of a new guardian. Where does he search? New York City, of course. Why? Because the filmmakers thought it would make for a humorous juxtaposition of culture.
Haven’t the filmmakers seen “Rush Hour” and its many imitations? Apparently not, because “Bulletproof Monk” has a snide confidence that its petty jokes of culture shock will actually elicit laughs while altogether failing to realize that the punch lines weren’t that funny the first time, let alone this time.
Soon the protagonist stumbles upon Kar (Seann William Scott, “American Pie,”), a pickpocket, and the painfully overdone process of Monk With No Name-playing-mentor begins. Now the film relies on content even older than Chris Tucker’s career — “The Karate Kid” penned extremely similar material nearly two decades ago.
Oddly enough, this poor collage job of a plot actually seems to steal some scraps from the Bard’s “Macbeth,” which is surprising because you get the distinct feeling that the writers of “Bulletproof Monk” never made it past the fifth grade.
Double, double, the film toils and troubles as it updates the “impossible” moving of Great Birnam wood into subway terminology and Lady Macbeth into a modern day Nazi searching for an Aryan fountain of youth for her grandfather.
The film also makes a bid at scattered Christ references as it opens with an image of a rope cross, and the scroll carries messianic undertones. Again, don’t get carried away; comparing this movie to the Bible is akin to likening “Debbie Does Dallas” to “Notes from the Underground.”
In terms of action, the movie does nothing to distinguish itself from other similarly themed Far East-meet-America flicks. Edits are frequently rough, camerawork is often blurry and the stunts aren’t even that impressive.
The picture has a serious anticlimax when Kar finally gathers the willpower to defy gravity. Rather than appearing to actually fly, Kar looks like a drunken partygoer getting his groove on to a “House of Pain” track.
Full of self-proclaimed “fortune-cookie philosophy,” “Bulletproof Monk” simply comes up short all around. “The Karate Kid,” “Rush Hour” and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” are all far superior films available at a video store near you.
Grade: F
